We have seen how to enable Mozilla Firefox hardware acceleration on Linux and this time we will see how to enable Google Chrome hardware acceleration; this guide will work on any major Operative System since the steps indicated are fully contained within Google Chrome’s settings.

Hardware acceleration is the use of specific computer hardware, like the graphic card for graphic related tasks, to perform some functions faster than is possible in “software-mode” running on the more general-purpose CPU. In order to benefit from hardware acceleration, the application must be programmed to support it and such support must be enabled at runtime (when the application is run by the user); the major browsers, like Mozilla Firefox and in this case Google Chrome, are programmed to support hardware acceleration, but not always they are enabled to use it.

Despite its past, Mozilla Firefox browser is now as fast and agile as its rival Google Chrome, but there is one aspect where the open source browser still loses a few points: the GPU hardware acceleration support on GNU/Linux. With this guide we will see how to enable Firefox hardware acceleration on Linux and therefore improving its performances.

The guide has been tested on Ubuntu LTS 14:04 with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and Mozilla Firefox 34.0, but it should be valid for all distribution of Linux and newer versions of Mozilla Firefox.

In this guide we will see how to enable the VDPAU hardware acceleration in flash player on Ubuntu and derivatives for any Nvidia, Intel and AMD GPU.

VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is the name of a library that allows to assign a part of the workload of decoding and post-processing a video to the GPU; this features can be used even for Flash playback.

In Ubuntu the native support for the VDPAU hardware acceleration is not active by default, but it can ben enabled with the following procedure: